A 7am start was a bit better.  I was soon confronted with Raphi asking me whether I wanted to start a band or throw a party.  I proceeded with caution as I was not sure whether we were discussing fantasy or reality.  In case it was reality, I went with band.  I thought it might be easier to execute (make shift drums, a couple of shakers) . Turns out that she had already decided party.  I did my best to manage expectations.  In any case I wasn’t prepared to discuss it until I had had my coffee.

Coffee and rusks were had on the patio, it was a good start to the day only interrupted once by Caleb asking Fred to play hide-and-go-seek with him because, “Baby Hope is the only one who will play with me and she’s not very good at it.”

After coffee, the children asked me when school was going to start.  They had obviously enjoyed my day one activity programme.  Unfortunately for them, since it was Saturday I had already decided to take the day off.

We did however have a story time planned.  As a lock down project, we have decided to run a story-writing challenge among the adults.  The only takers have been myself, Daba (my dad) and Nana.  Today’s topic was, “A Knock at the Door”.  We gathered the children to listen to the three stories.  The whole exercise ended up taking up a good chunk of the morning because the children had to wait for Nana to make coffee and then once coffee was ready they all wanted a snack.  While we were waiting we spotted the neighbour in a speedo.  The stories were good fun and Caleb said mine was the worst.

After story time, Raphi told me to make the cake for the party.  I could see no way out of it and so I baked a cake.  Everybody had dispersed for some downtime and it was time for Jethro to go down for his second nap so we decided to hold the party later in the day.  Jethro had a 10 minute nap.

Later in the afternoon, I discovered that my sister had filled the splash pool with water from the hose pipe.  I thought to tell her that in the Eastern Cape we don’t do this but I decided that we can only really deal with one national disaster at a time.  And so the children enjoyed some water play and I brought out the cake.

Before we knew it, it was time to light the fire for supper.  Helen said to Christopher that perhaps we should have some chicken as we had been eating a lot of red meat.  And so we had rib eye steak and some chicken.

Before I end off, it is worth mentioning that Daba ran 8km in the garden today.